19
Mar, 2021
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Building a Reliable Remote Workforce with Managed IT Services

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Remote work has been a popular topic for a few years, but over the past year, with so many people forced into working from home, a lot has been written about it. Today, we wanted to briefly talk about some of the technology that is suggested for the remote business, and what we can do to help you support remote workers. 

What Tools Do You Need for Remote Work?

If your business is going to effectively (and securely) support remote workers, your IT infrastructure needs to include:

  • Secure, encrypted access to your office network (via a VPN, or Virtual Private Network).
  • Communication tools, such as Voice over IP, video conferencing, and instant messaging.
  • Employees need devices at home that can reliably perform the tasks required of them.
  • Security awareness is still a critical piece, even when working remotely.

What About IT Support? 

Heading into last March the prevailing sentiment around the business world was that businesses were better off operating from a brick and mortar location than having a truly remote workforce. The loss of productivity was the major consideration, but there were (and are) questions about how to support a remote workforce; especially one that is effectively BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). 

Once the pandemic hit, many businesses, afraid as the realities of the time started to kick in, jumped into the remote workforce pool with both feet. Many of these businesses were not prepared to do so. While it is true that a remote workforce demands that a business leans on the IT, many businesses simply weren’t set up for this eventuality and it hindered their ability to do business.

At NuTech Services, our professional technicians were ready to help businesses transition from on-site to remote and we’ll be here to help transition back when our clients decide it’s time. We prioritize flexible and scalable solutions that promote productivity, operational efficiency, and most of all, security.  Without a plan to promote those three ideals, you just have pieces of technology that are constantly in jeopardy of corruption, failure, and misuse. 

Our comprehensive support strategy is deployed in three ways. They are:

  • We Get You the Tools – Not only do we use cutting-edge tools to monitor your existing hardware and remote connections, we also can procure the necessary tools that your business would need to get the most out of its human resources.
  • We Thoroughly Monitor and Manage – Using those cutting-edge tools, we are able to completely monitor and manage your business’ network and infrastructure, ensuring that if something were to gain access to your network, that it is removed before it becomes an operational problem for your business. 
  • We Follow Through – In our business, we realize there is absolutely no room for error. Our team, that is made up of technicians and business consultants, can help put you in the position to actually fit your IT management and support, to your business’ current needs; and, while keeping an eye on the future IT needs of your business. 

Sure, our main purpose is to keep your IT working as intended and eliminate downtime, but we can also provide you with powerful consulting tools, best-in-area technology procurement, and professional installation of IT tools that can absolutely transform your business. If you would like to talk to one of our consultants about getting the IT and the IT support your business needs right now, give us a call today at 810.230.9455. 

1
Mar, 2021
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What Can Be Done to Counter COVID-19-Themed Scams?

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As commonly happens with any disaster, COVID-19 has inspired no short supply of scams. While these scams initially focused upon the relief funds that were delivered to people to help sustain the suffering economy, the ongoing vaccine distribution efforts have given those behind these efforts a new means of attack.

Let’s consider how these scams have materialized over the past year.

The Opportunity COVID-19 Gives Scammers

Like most predators, hackers will fully utilize every advantage they have over their intended prey. With COVID-19, this advantage comes in the form of the desperation many still feel for news. As a result, numerous scams have been reported to reference the coronavirus outbreak, adopting a wide variety of methods.

Some of the old tricks that these scammers have adapted include:

  • Phishing – While phishing scams are nothing new, and certainly won’t end with COVID-19, scammers have certainly taken advantage of it during these tumultuous times. By sending emails and other messages (as we’ll get into) that appear to come from a trustworthy source or an authority, a scammer can manipulate their target into compliance.
    • Vishing – This form of verbal phishing is conducted over the telephone but is otherwise identical to your more typical phishing scams.
    • SMiShing – Once again, a basic phishing attack, but carried out through SMS texts.
  • Pretexting – Basically, this is what occurs when someone reaches out to you seeking out your information under the guise of calling from some trustworthy entity looking for verification. As you would imagine, this has not been uncommon as of late.
  • Spoofing – Spoofing is the act of disguising a URL or a profile to appear to link to one location, but take the target to another, generally malicious one.
  • Quid Pro Quo – Just as it sounds, a scammer offers someone something in return for their information, but never holds up their end of the bargain. A longer scam, this usually requires some level of trust to be established but can be quite lucrative for the miscreant who carries it out.

How to Protect Your Business from Scams

Like most things having to do with cybercrime, there isn’t really a surefire way to prevent such scams from appearing, which means that the onus to keep data safe falls to the user that is dealing with these scams firsthand.

The biggest thing that you can do—and that you should encourage your team to do—is to verify everything. Any time anyone requests something of you online—whether it seems to be your boss, your coworker, your parents, or the CDC—you need to make sure you’re talking to who you think you’re talking to.

Verify. Everyone. And. Everything.

With so much of modern life now utilizing the Internet, it is nothing if not irresponsible to not have an appreciation for the severity of today’s biggest threat landscape. Keeping a good perspective about how valuable your personal information is and treating it as such with best practices can very much help protect you and your business from cybercriminals.

NuTech Services is here to help you see to your business’ cybersecurity preparedness and protections. Find out more about what we can offer by calling our team of professionals at 810.230.9455 today.

5
Oct, 2020
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Why Business Technology Won’t Change Back

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There is no denying that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused some major operational shifts in how most businesses conduct themselves and their processes, with many of these shifts relying on technology solutions. While there’s still no telling for certain how much longer these conditions will persist, we predict that many businesses won’t abandon these solutions once the present danger has passed. Let’s discuss why we have this expectation.

What Does “Normal” Mean?

Let’s just come out and say it: as terrible as the pandemic has been for so many, it has also given businesses some very strong motivations to adapt and innovate. Really, most had no choice if they wanted to remain open in the long-term.

This led to many businesses finally adopting the modern solutions that enabled productive and secure remote work and collaboration.

So, the question remains: what exactly do we expect to happen before we consider ourselves at a “normal” point once more? Does that mean the way things were pre-COVID-19, or some new standard that reflects what we’ve learned? At NuTech Services, we’re firmly in the latter camp, that the most successful businesses will be the ones to carry on with the strategies that have allowed operations to continue safely and securely. Let’s consider some of the larger impacts of these shifts, and why we think these shifts are going to prove permanent.

Improved Productivity

Regardless of what kind of disaster strikes a business, it will become important that the business is able to use what resources they do have to the fullest. With modern IT solutions in place, this benchmark can be attainably pushed higher.

This is due not only to the improvement in technology’s efficiency, it also has to do with its portability. In addition to your team being able to spend more time in the office that isn’t taken up by their repetitive tasks, they are also no longer confined to doing their work while in the office. Thanks to today’s increasingly mobile solutions, productive work can be accomplished from anywhere a secure Internet connection can be established.

As a result, time that once offered no opportunity to be productive to a business can now be used more effectively to help reach the organization’s goals.

Seamless Collaboration

Without the metaphorical water cooler to gather around and chat during the workday, many companies have rolled out the means for their employees to virtually socialize with one another as well as work productively on shared goals and ideas. These efforts have been very successful and have actually shown some improvements in internal company cultures. Because certain people would tend to socialize exclusively with certain coworkers throughout the day, the workplace could become clique-y, biased, and exclusionary.

However, once collaboration and such communications were rendered digital, many of these divides could be bridged, allowing for a more inclusive work process.

Equalized Opportunity through Tech

With more and more jobs opening in the digital space, companies will need to have fingers on the keyboards. As a result, former job requirements like education and proximity to the business will be considerably less important to hiring managers. Really, it’ll be more of a matter of who can deliver upon their responsibilities, regardless of age, race, or any other “unofficial disqualifier.”

So no, it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll ever really go back to the way things were in many industries. After all, the business world is all about progress… it would be a shame to sacrifice all the progress that the pandemic has forced upon us once it is over.

Regardless of how your business is operating, now or in the future, NuTech Services can help ensure it is doing so with reliable and efficient technology. To learn more about the services and solutions we offer, give us a call at 810.230.9455.

28
Sep, 2020
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How Companies Will Need IT as They Return to Workplaces

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As the pandemic enters its third quarter, many places have the spread of the COVID-19 virus under control and are starting to open up offices and other workplaces. Ultimately, it is the business owners’ and managers’ decision whether or not to demand attendance in an office, as most jobs completed in one can be effectively completed from home. For businesses that are opening their office and inviting their employees back, technology is still going to play a significant role. Let’s take a look at what IT is going to be important for people returning to the office after all this time.

It’s true that there are a lot of businesses that rely on their workforce to show up every day. Many of these businesses were forced to shut down or operate at limited capacity during the pandemic but are just now getting up to speed. Outside of operations, there are a lot of administrative uses of technology, some of which involve protecting employee and customer information. Let’s get into some of the strategies that businesses can use to get the most out of their workforce at this time. 

Remote Operations

Ironically, until this whole COVID-19 mess is over with, the most prudent decisions are going to be made using technology that supports remote work, even if you’ve mandated employees to work at your place of business. Not only does it remove physical interaction of your staff to protect them from contracting potentially dangerous viruses, it protects clients as well.

This strategy includes the use of internet-based tools and substantial training initiatives. According to an IMB survey just over half of remote workers during the pandemic were actually trained to protect work-related resources, so making employee training a priority makes sense. 

Hybrid Operations

There’s a saying, “You have to crawl before you walk.” It means that you have to work up to something. If you already have a remote workforce and you are looking to get them to move back to the office or the workplace, you should start implementing a strategy that gets people in waves. The most important thing is to prioritize employee health during this time, as any COVID-19 outbreak could make it difficult for you to conduct business at all. 

In regards to the IT deployment, this strategy is probably the most resource intensive because you have to both be cognizant of your network security inside your business, while also keeping abreast of how your remote workers are using your computing resources. 

Onsite Operations

Getting back to “business-as-usual” will be nice, and if you can accomplish it now, that’s great. It’s just not a strategy many businesses can support at this juncture, especially if they feature open office spaces and shared bathroom facilities. IT management is simpler for IT administrators when everyone is in one location and on the same page. 

Regardless of what your plans are for your human resources, you need to ensure that everyone understands how to mitigate the numerous types of threats your business faces each day. To talk to one of our security professionals about your business’ situation, call us today at 810.230.9455.

21
Aug, 2020
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Cybersecurity Needs to Shift for Businesses to Survive

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With some motivation from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses are adjusting their approach to cybersecurity. Typically, businesses would take a more measured approach in their day-to-day security improvements, while swiftly acting if there was any kind of clear and present danger. While this proved effective, the current situation has now shifted priorities over to maintaining resilience. Let’s examine some of these shifts, and how an advantage can be gained through a consistent cybersecurity strategy.

The Changes We’ve Witnessed

For such an… eventful… year, it started off with little anticipation of the events to come. Businesses had ample time to plan their 2020 technology budgets, but most (if not all) of these budgets were postponed (if not thrown out the proverbial window) with the spread of COVID-19.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, cybercriminals are typically quite opportunistic, and so many took advantage of the crisis at hand to strike. Exacerbating this issue even further, many businesses saw their security budgets as a candidate for budget cuts and borrowing funds. Due to these circumstances, these businesses had weakened security measures during the time that strong security would be needed the most.

However, industry analysts have found the events that have followed somewhat surprising. While security spending was cut by many, the investments that remain are still mitigating attacks. In fact, data breaches fell by a full third during the first half of 2020.

Naturally, many businesses are now wondering if the large investments they were making into their cybersecurity were actually helping them all that much.

Don’t Abandon What Works

Before we go any further, we wanted to take a moment and identify a few security investments that—despite the shifting viewpoints on cybersecurity spending—should not be sacrificed:

  • Endpoint protection – There are policies that you need to have in place, like those that secure your network’s entry points, in order to keep threats out of your business network. Cybercriminals now have some very sophisticated means of gaining access, which means you need to be able to detect, identify, contain, and neutralize these attacks.
  • Employee training – Nowadays, phishing attacks are one of, if not the, most popular cyberthreats out there today. If you want to keep your network and the data it stores sufficiently secure, you need to make sure your employees can both identify a phishing attempt and address it appropriately.
  • Encryption for remote connections – Remote work has become a very popular option, but this makes your security as you implement such a strategy no less important. Implementing a trustworthy remote access solution or installing an enterprise VPN will help to protect your business as you continue its operations.
  • Mobile access management – The smartphone is now an essential business tool, but it is used even more for personal use. Therefore, it is crucial that you have the protections in place to secure these devices.

With these technologies supporting your security, you can maintain your productivity without putting your resources and data at risk.

How to Move Forward

With so many businesses now tightening their belts and their budgets, it’s a safe bet that we’ll see emerging strategies that integrate what we have learned in the recent past with the limited finances that organizations have access to today. In short, we’ll see far more cost-efficient cybersecurity platforms coming to the fore. We’re confident that these platforms will commonly feature a few strategies:

  • Building unified resilience – Which sounds easier, protecting a few disparate departments or protecting an entire business with consistent security practices? Obviously, the latter. Establishing a universal strategy can help reduce overhead spent on support as well as encourage a more continuous business.
  • Improving cyber hygiene – Many organizations lack a sufficient system to properly manage the different levels of access their digital resources should require. Implementing such a system can provide operational benefits to all levels of the business that does so.
  • Focusing on cooperation – While the pandemic has separated many from their coworkers, it has also demonstrated how crucial it is for departments to work together to accomplish the business’ goals. In the same vein, keeping up a standard of shared security responsibility makes it harder for bad actors to successfully strike.

One thing is abundantly clear: cybersecurity needs to be a major focus point from here on out, even more so than it was before. NuTech Services can help you implement the protections you need. Reach out to our experts today by calling 810.230.9455.

14
Aug, 2020
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COVID-19 Vaccine Attacks Teach an Important Cybersecurity Lesson

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Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus has wreaked havoc across the globe, there has been a lot of hope and effort put towards developing a vaccine against it. Unfortunately, just as some experiments have produced promising results, hackers have begun targeting the research centers responsible. Let’s look at this situation to see what it can teach us.

The Cozy Bear Threat

According to the National Cyber Security Centre, a government security organization based in the United Kingdom, a hacking group known as “APT29” (also referred to as “the Dukes” or “Cozy Bear”) has actively targeted the research centers conducting research into developing a COVID-19 vaccine. These claims have been supported by both the United States’ National Security Agency and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment.

In fact, the National Cyber Security Center released a report that outlined the attack that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency also endorses.

This report describes the use of various exploits in conjunction with spear phishing attacks by APT29. Both tactics give APT29 access to carry out the rest of their attacks, which often involves deploying malware known as WellMess or WellMail.

On a side note, some of these exploits have been patched, so make sure you’re also up to date on your patches as well.

Many experts also share the opinion that Cozy Bear has struck before, and that the current threat needs to be taken very seriously as a result. It is believed that APT29 was responsible for the 2016 intrusion into the Democratic National Committee’s systems, as reported by CNN. The group has also been linked to assorted attacks on healthcare, energy, governmental and diplomatic organizations, and think tanks in the past.

What is Spear Phishing?

Phishing is a form of hacking that targets the end user, rather than using software vulnerabilities, to gain access to a system. Spear phishing is a more direct form of phishing. Instead of sending a generic message to massive groups of potential targets to see who takes the bait, spear phishing is specifically directed to an individual with access to key data and resources.

While APT29 may not target your organization as a part of these efforts to steal research, it is nevertheless critical that you and your team can recognize a potential phishing attack and mitigate it before it causes significant problems. While the following is by no means a comprehensive list of warning signs, it is a good place to start educating your team:

  • Always check the details. Many phishing attacks can be identified by close-but-no-cigar “From” addresses. When in doubt, try looking up the email address that sent an email.
  • Proofread the message. While legitimate messages can contain terrible spelling and grammar mistakes, and attackers can more and more effectively mimic professional communications, many phishing messages can be rife with errors.
  • Double-check. If possible, don’t be afraid to confirm that the email is legitimate by reaching out to the supposed sender (through some non-email form of communication) to confirm that they sent the message.

For more assistance in dealing with phishing attacks, reach out to us! At NuTech Services, we’re motivated to help prevent a phishing attack from impacting your operations. Give us a call at 810.230.9455 to learn more.

12
Aug, 2020
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How to Host a Hamilton Party Online

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Hamilton had risen to be one of the most coveted theater tickets before the pandemic struck, having a low-end price tag of over $600, with a nine month wait. Now that the pandemic is in full swing, however, there is another option that enables you to catch the show.

On July 3rd, the Tony-winning Broadway musical was released on Disney+, meaning that history buffs and theater nerds alike don’t have to Wait for It. Even better, you can now watch Hamilton with all your friends. We Know, it’s pretty cool, especially since you don’t all need to be In the Room Where it Happens. Let’s go over how you can arrange that in this song-title-pun-filled blog.

Making Use of a Disney+ Watch Party

What is a Watch Party? Simple: it’s where you virtually gather with your friends and family to simultaneously stream a movie or show together, despite being in different locations. Many services, like Amazon Video, added this feature to help people make it through social distancing during the global COVID-19 pandemic without telling anyone to “Meet Me Inside.”

Hosting a Hamilton Watch Party

To enjoy this theater production of the life and times of Alexander Hamilton along with your socially distant friends, there are a few things that will be required of all participants.

Disney+

Naturally, everyone who wants to watch will need an individual Disney+ account. Unfortunately, the free trial offer for Disney+ is no longer offered. After all, once the second season of the Mandalorian was announced, they knew they could say “You’ll Be Back” to all their subscribers (we’ll see how the $30 rental for the live-action Mulan impacts this).

Subscribing only requires a quick visit to https://www.disneyplus.com/. You may also want to check online for any promotional codes that may be currently offered.

A Browser Plugin

Everyone also needs to install a Chrome browser plugin. There are some exclusive to Disney+, while others allow you to host watch parties via Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Prime Video as well. If you’re hosting, pick the one that works for you and make sure everyone has it installed ahead of time so there aren’t any delays. If you only care about doing a watch party with Disney Plus, you can use the Disney Plus Party plugin. If you want to host watch parties with Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, and Hulu as well, you can check out Vemos.

These plugins will let you synchronize your video with the rest of the watch party and chat with one another. Add the plugin to the top of your browser and create an account.

Once that’s accomplished, you can start up Disney+ in your Chrome browser and start the movie. Then you can click on your new plugin and select the option to host. You’ll be prompted to name your viewing room. Meanwhile, the rest of your party will need to have installed the plugin, created an account, joined a movie, and entered the name of your room. That Would Be Enough for everyone to participate.

Then, as the host, you have the power to start the movie and have it play to everyone’s device. You can pause it so that people can Take a Break without asking “What’d I Miss?” or you can play the entire production Non-Stop.

Fair warning—some of these group viewing applications are only free for a set number of hours each week. Make sure you pick one long enough to view the whole thing, so nobody starts asking What Comes Next?

With any luck, this will allow you and your friends to watch Hamilton and keep everyone Satisfied.

Want more handy technology tips and tricks? Consider NuTech Services Your Obedient Servant. Each week, we update this blog with more tips and best practices, along with a Hurricane of useful technology information. With our help, you don’t have to feel Helpless when it comes to your business’ IT. We can be your Right Hand Man, just give us a call at 810.230.9455.

Let us know, how did we do with the song title puns? One Last Time, don’t forget to subscribe to our blog!

8
May, 2020
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The State of the Internet in a Pandemic

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Millions of Americans are suddenly working from home. Students are now learning online. We’re all surviving the quarantine by binge watching our favorite shows on Netflix and Zooming with our friends and family. How does this bode for the Internet, and security in general? Let’s discuss some recent findings.

A Look at the Numbers

Before the pandemic hit, it was believed that roughly 5.2 percent of Americans worked out of their home. That’s about 8 million people, and that number is fairly recent, from 2017. By the end of 2019, we can estimate it was maybe between 5.5 percent to 6 percent.

We can simplify this and say one out of every 20 American workers worked from home before the pandemic.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only a mere 29% of Americans can actually work from home. That takes into consideration jobs that simply require a person to be at the workplace, like many in the food industry, delivery, construction and many more.

At the time of writing this, I have yet to find solid statistics for the number of Americans working from home right now, but there is a general consensus that it’s somewhere around one in five to one in three. 

That falls right in line with what the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows, and we’re talking about the whole of the United States – things are going to feel different in different states and different areas.

How is the Internet Holding Up?

Back on topic, up to a third of all workers are now doing their jobs from home, plus kids of all ages are taking classes and doing their homework online, on top of the normal traffic that we see everyday. I’m talking about Netflix and other streaming services, online video games, YouTube and social media; all of these services are seeing a huge swing in traffic as more people are stuck at home.

Netflix’s usage, which is normally about 15% of all global Internet traffic, has hit all-time highs, and ISPs are seeing record-breaking amounts of Internet traffic all in all. Thankfully, many ISPs and mobile carriers have loosened or temporarily lifted data caps that would have otherwise caused massive expenses for users trying to work from home (Interestingly, these data caps were supposedly in place to ensure the service functions well. It turns out that in general, the service can still work as intended without them. Let’s hope service providers don’t revert back to the old ways after all this is over).

All that said, it’s not perfect for everyone. Rural users with limited access to broadband are still struggling, and in larger, more populated areas where the infrastructure might be a little older have been bumping into frustrating downtime. Still, all in all, a large part of our workforce is able to get things done effectively while maintaining quarantine, and that’s huge.

Cybersecurity is More Important Than Ever

Here’s the thing; being able to stay in business and keep your customers happy and your employees safe during this trying time is a big deal. That said, you can’t do all of that without also understanding the additional risks you might be opening up to. This isn’t meant to sound like doom and gloom – I want businesses to survive and strive. I want to hear success stories. I want business owners coming out of this with a new perspective on how they operate their business, trust their employees, and bolster their bottom line.

This could be a renaissance for the modern office, shifting the paradigm to normalize a remote workforce. Suddenly, you have fewer expenses, happier employees, and everyone can wear comfy pants more often. Or, maybe we’ll all decide we miss working together in the office so much and never look back. Either way, I digress…

Your business might not be able to see how this all turns out if you don’t secure all those new endpoints. Everyone who is working from home on a personal device just opened up a new weakness in your IT’s armor, especially if you aren’t providing the proper means of accessing company data and applications.

Ensuring that your users are able to work securely is going to be critical, because the last thing you need to deal with is additional downtime or data breaches.

NuTech Services can help review your needs and provide the right solutions to ensure your remote workforce can effectively do their jobs without risking your data. If you need help or advice, give us a call at 810.230.9455 to get started.